Podcast #71: TBD Law, with Matt Homann

June 7th, 2016

“What TBD law is in a nutshell is taking the best part of the serendipitous things that happen at conferences—the people you meet, the peers you engage with, the ideas you share—and building an entire event around those things.” — Matt Homann

On this week’s podcast, Sam talks with Matt Homann, founder of Filament. Filament and Lawyerist are collaborating on TBD Law, a conference/retreat/summit/workshop about the future of law for solosmall firms.

ROSS Is Cool, but It Isn’t Ready to Take Away Your Job

In last week’s podcast, Sam recapped his trip to CodeX, a legal tech conference at Stanford. This week, Sam expanded on that discussion, talking about ROSS, a startup that uses IBM’s Watson supercomputer technology to monitor the law and to perform legal research.

Sam had a chance to demo ROSS, and told Aaron that, at least as things stand now, ROSS won’t be replacing lawyers any time soon. ROSS does a good job at figuring out what your question is and framing it in natural language, but it is unclear as to whether the results it returns would be superior to Westlaw, Lexis or Fastcase. Bottom line: the hype over ROSS as revolutionary artificial intelligence is misplaced, but it actually does a good job making the task of natural language searching much easier.

Andrew Arruda, the CEO of ROSS, told Sam that he’s very interested in seeing ROSS as a solution for solosmall attorneys, and is planning on pricing it accordingly.

TBD Law, with Matt Homann

Matt Homann is the founder of Filament, a Saint Louis company that is reinventing meetings by promising inspiration, inclusion, connectivity, and simplicity. Matt describes himself as a recovering lawyer. He now spends his time as a creative facilitator, helping groups of people step outside of their comfort zone and learn to meaningfully collaborate with one another.